The first planned sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement began in July 1958 in Wichita, Kansas. The goal was the integration of segregated businesses. The movement spread quickly to Oklahoma City. The success of the Oklahoma sit-ins led to sit-ins throughout the South. While North Carolina is known for the contentious sit-ins in 1960 in Greensboro, equally successful sit-ins also occurred in Raleigh. The approximately 40 students who participated in the Raleigh sit-ins were from 2 HBCU institutions of higher learning – Shaw University and St. Augustine’s University. The success of the sit-ins here led to the formation of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), by a Shaw University graduate, community organizer and civil rights advocate Ella Josephine Baker, a major and often overlooked figure in the Civil Rights Movement.

Ella Baker graduated as valedictorian from Shaw University in Raleigh, NC in 1927. In 1940, she worked as a field secretary for the NAACP, later serving as director of branches. After the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization, In Friendship, to raise money to fight Jim Crow Laws in the South. In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King’s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). However, dismayed by the sexist hierarchy of the SCLC she resigned her organizing position.

Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership and promoted instead grassroots organizing, radical democracy and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and to advocate for themselves. For this reason she was critical of the cult of personality around Dr. King and didn’t feel that he was connected to the people he was leading. However, she appreciated his skills as an orator.

Following the February 1960 sit-ins at North Carolina A&T University, Baker began assisting new student activists and later organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee began.

I was invited by Small School residency in Raleigh to come spend 3.5 weeks in Raleigh, my hometown, to get a mural up. Uncertain what the focus of the mural would be I was moved to learn of the pivotal role Shaw University and Saint Augustines University students played in mandating desegregation in Raleigh. (The wall for the work is on an art gallery 2 blocks from Shaw University and approximately 2 blocks from the site of the lunch counter sit-ins.) Wanting to address the circular nature of history and to contemporize the demonstrations of the 60s I juxtaposed an historical image from a downtown Raleigh 1960 sit-in with a partial list of words banned in federal documents by the current administration as they pertain to the image.

This list comes from a New York Times article published March 7, 2025.

A big shout out to JP Reuer and his wife Sally Van Gorder for arranging this visit. Thanks also for being such excellent hosts and for providing the opportunity to reconnect with childhood friends. Thank you to Will Alphin for his generous support with this project and to Lump Gallery for the wall. Lastly, thank you to everyone who assisted with the installation.